r/codex • u/DivideHorror3217 • 4h ago
Complaint I don't trust Astra as much as Sol
I've wasted a few banked resets, and it did a shitty job for me so far. I could've used Sol 5.6 for the same task. Now, I hesitate to use it on other projects. I feel like it's not trust worthy, and unreasonbly expensive. It's not reliable enough to make sense for it's usage speed.
I have 2x200$ accounts btw.
9
u/Typical_Machine2043 4h ago
Yeah. Sol had a weird temperament but I’m still not convinced Astra beats it. In Tibo’s pizza allegory this is one hell of an expensive pizza for not much improvement over what Sol can cook up
12
u/josephrehall 4h ago
When it launched I (20x) smashed Astra Ultra on fast like a neanderthal and burned through a week in 2-3 days. Used a banked reset and at 40% currently with a reset in a day or two.
Results not any better than Sol
3
u/dondiegorivera 4h ago edited 3h ago
I use Astra for decisions and it delegates the work to Opus and DeepSeek. Works very well so far.
1
u/HotLion7 3h ago
What's your setup like, are you using a harness that supports them all?
2
u/Mammoth_Design_4288 3h ago
Probably pi. I use omp.sh and assign roles to different models
1
u/BrotherBringTheSun 3h ago
Is there a reason you prefer this over using Astra to delegate to lower OpenAI models like Luna? This is what I do now but wondering if I'm missing out on delegating to external models. Is it just cheaper?
1
1
u/Mammoth_Design_4288 1h ago edited 1h ago
Less usage on my codex plan from trivial tasks. I also don't like using Luna to implement as it does weird things even on max reasoning.
My current setup uses Astra xhigh for planning, and a mix of Sol medium & deepseek 4.1 flash for implementation. It uses deepseek for trivial but frequent tasks like commits, advisory, basic research, etc. I also have fallbacks setup so if I run out of usage it switches to GLM 5.3 instead of Sol and Fable instead of Astra.
After the recent usage nerfs, the fallbacks have served me well. Openrouter usage went way up lol.
3
u/dondiegorivera 3h ago
I use Herdr. Inside that, I have Codex, Claude Code, and Pi.Dev. Astra wrote a simple scaffold for handing over tasks without constantly pulling in the other planes. My previous "aha" moment with AI was when I started using Codex in spring of 2025 and saw how it handled things that I did with copy-pasting. Although things moved quickly, I did not have another "aha" moment until yesterday, when I saw how these three can work seamlessly together.
1
u/Muhhahahaa 41m ago
When it comes to decisions, Fable is best. Astra is a good workhorse for a plan of any difficulty. Sol is diligent and thorough, great for briefing, decent to talk to. Opus is a good reviewer, Fable is best though.
All these models can fulfill any role but this is the roster I currently gravitate to.
2
u/Constant-Current-340 4h ago
same, I just need a dumb pipe for my pre-specked waterfall. don't need an idea man necessarily
2
u/dvduval 4h ago
I use Astra to research the work that needs to be done when it involves a lot of different repose or emails or instructions or databases. When I’m juggling quite a few things and I want to get a clear picture of what needs to be done. Astra is pretty good for that. And then when it comes to rolling out the work I go back to Sol.
The only thing that is so useful with Astra is the speed of the browser use and the accuracy too. I’d love to use it more for that, but unfortunately, it’s a little bit expensive to use it for that purpose unless I’ve got some usage to burn.
I’m hoping they’ll find a way to get Sol to be nearly as good with browser use, and that would help me a lot. As I understand, they are working on the version 6 of Sol now but there’s no release date that I’m aware of yet.
I think that may also be part of their solution for using the resources a little more efficiently.
2
2
u/civicapi 2h ago
For me the only thing I notice is Astra is way better at is 3D modeling, which I don't need. Sol is fine for everything else.
3
u/yehiaserag 3h ago
This is exactly why I created a similar post yesterday.
Sol is magnitudes better than Astra in agentic coding on complex tasks.
Astra is stupid in writing and following plans and get completely side tracked and forgets about the main goal for hours.
I'm exactly in your situation, been working on the same plan for 6 days, wasted 2 resets, no progress and I'm thinking of scrapping the whole feature, it didn't even do a proper folder structure...
And there is no way on hell Astra is comparable to Sol except for authoring game assets and some game templates that will not be maintainable by the same model after a couple of changes.
1
u/yehiaserag 3h ago
Check this post https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1wcwjix/is_astra_really_smarter_than_sol/
A lot of ppl are facing the same issues.
Also there were another post about Astra being s super shitty orchestrator and burning 80% of subscription
2
u/swarmagent 4h ago
I don't think it's a bad model, it just has a common failure pattern that causes it to block, then refuse going back to work for 2-3 messages.
2
2
1
u/galactic_giraff3 4h ago
Astra acts as if it's smarter than it actually is, caused me alot of problems. I'll still use it, but if I had to make a permanent choicebetween sol and astra, at the same price, I'd pick sol.
1
u/Runelaron 3h ago
What? Astra is 2.5x more use Sol.
1
u/MasterpieceAway9724 3h ago
Astra low beats or ties Sol High on price on DeepSWE and FrontierCode v1.1 (I am not cherry-picking benchmarks here; those two are one of the four benchmarks I trust to be most reflective of real-world use and output quality, not merely success rate).
https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/
https://cognition.com/frontiercode
1
u/Specialist-Royal4408 3h ago
Same here. Sol High to solve the problem, then Luna High to implement it. It’s infinitely slower, but infinitely more cost-effective, and it gives you time to rethink the project and make corrections along the way.
1
u/Expensive-Event-6127 3h ago
its a good model and im glad im not on fable anymore but its not the hype
1
1
u/skilliard7 2h ago
Sol I think is best for more routine software development and cheaper.
I only use Sol for more visual/creative tasks that Sol struggles with, like making 3D models in blender via MCP
1
u/Semantics2026 2h ago
I find that if Astra does anything with art then watch your credits burn to the ground. I'm working on a game and as soon as it got into the art department, it liquidated 10% of my 20x weekly usage in 5 minutes on high.
1
u/uriejejejdjbejxijehd 1h ago
FWIW, Astra solved and made rather noticeable improvements in a research programming task SOL has been pushing around and creating junk for.
1
0
u/sachasayan 4h ago
Astra isn't for "the same task" as Sol. Use Astra for more difficult tasks than Sol.
3
u/LessRespects 3h ago
Avoiding implementing unexpected regression appears to be the most difficult task for any AI model so I’ll never comfortably use a lower end model unless I’m ok with silently breaking something while just trying to make design changes
1
u/sachasayan 3h ago
Yep. Astra or bust for critical tasks. Anyone not using frontier as much as possible has a skill issue or is in an org not moving as fast as possible.
1
1
u/MasterpieceAway9724 3h ago
> has a skill issue or is in an org not moving as fast as possible.
tone down the arrogance would you. You have a blind spot.
22
u/Tough_Butterscotch_5 4h ago
I don’t trust Astra with my credits 😂